They Were Divided - Miklos Banffy [118]
When Balint was alone he dined by the light of a small lamp off the bread and bacon he had brought with him and then sat outside the opening. He did not light a fire, but just sat there quietly. It was a glorious starlit night with the countless stars of heaven shining brightly in the dark sky. He thought he had never seen so many, and the Milky Way was like a vast river of light, its darker patches like islands, that wound its way from one horizon to the other. The great constellations were like letters of fire in the sky and, in Balint’s imagination, seemed to be making their way ever closer to him so as eventually to disclose some ageless secret message even to that worm-like creature that was man, the secret, perhaps, of life and death … and of eternity …
The distant horizons could still just be made out, especially where it seemed that some tiny reddish star could be glimpsed trembling through the tips of the sharp fang-like pines that covered the mountain ridges in front of him. Occasionally, and very far away, a dog could be heard barking in the valleys below. Then silence, only silence: but it was not the silence of an empty room, solitary and deadly; rather was it a living silence, a silence that pulsated with the life of the great forests.
Balint stayed where he was for a long time, alone outside his tent in the cold quiet night. His soul was filled with the beauty by which he was surrounded; and he fancied that he could almost hear Adrienne’s light steps as if she were already hastening towards him along forest paths paved with stars. Though they would not be together until the following day it was as if their desire for each other throbbed in unison on the mountain ridges that lay between them.
Two days before Adrienne had arrived at Margit’s little lodge. She was not the only guest. Pityu Kendy was already there and making himself extremely useful because, with the family there, there was too much work for the forest guard who found himself not only having to look after the two ponies, scythe the grass and bring it in for their fodder and bedding, but also to go down to Albak to fetch milk and poultry and Margit’s letters. So Pityu was at once put to work cutting wood and splitting kindling for the fire, cleaning the horses’ tack and also, which was far more important, pushing the perambulator along the mountain paths, seeing that it was first in the sun, then in the shade, and then in the sun again. Here in the mountains this was no longer women’s work, for there were more stones than soil on the rough tracks round the lodge. Pityu did everything he was asked with joy in his heart, for since he had transferred his hopeless love for Adrienne into an even deeper devotion to Margit, he was in total bondage to her. It was a happy bondage because Margit never teased him, as her sister had done, or saddened him by seeming to flirt with other men, as Adrienne had, but just accepted his hopeless devotion and listened to his litanies of love with an almost motherly tenderness and sympathy. Sometimes she would scold him, taking him to task for his tendency to drink too much, but she always treated him as a human being worth scolding and not as some sort of toy, which was how Adrienne had treated all her admirers. And the more she scolded the happier he was, because it meant that at least she had some use for him even if it was only splitting logs. As a result Pityu was happy; and it did not matter to him that he had to sleep at the other end of the barn from the forest guard, nor that